Top 10 Movies of 2008 in Which It Seriously Sucks to Have Breasts (Part I)

Posted at 5:00 AM Jul 25, 2008

By Bonnie Ruberg

Usually, I have nothing against having breasts. Speaking from personal experience, they're not bothering anyone, they fit well into a tank top, and occasionally they get the door held open for me by some man who doesn't know where my eyes are. All in all, they're a pretty good deal.

However, some of the top movies from the first half of 2008 would have us believe otherwise. We've seen a lot of flicks this year in which it straight-up sucks to have breasts -- or, for that matter, to be female at all. Check out the official list, but be warned: spoiler alert. Of course, the biggest spoiler is just that movie-makers like to screw over women with boobs. What's up with that, Hollywood?

10. Sweeney Todd

Blame it on the fact that she was pregnant during filming, but Helen Bonham Carter was sporting a lot of corset-induced cleavage in this year's darkest big-screen musical. What did it get her? Sure, for a little while she had a thriving business selling corpses as pies, but eventually her heaving-chested crush on Johnny Depp landed her in a furnace. What good are feminine curves when your entire body is on fire?

9. Cloverfield

Given that it's a movie about a giant creature attacking New York, Cloverfield doesn't really go well for anyone involved. With that said, girls have it particularly gruesome in this downer of a monster movie. As a clumsy twenty-something drags a camcorder, a few friends, and his panicked ass around the city, two female love interests emerge. One gets seriously injured and trapped inside a falling skyscraper, the other literally has her stomach explode. Fun.

8. Persepolis

OK, technically this movie came out in France in 2007, but it took a while to make it to America. There are lots of reason why it sucks to be a woman in Persepolis, an animated film about growing up in Iran, including repression and double standards. But the most serious offense this culture was committing? Duh, obviously fashion crimes. Wearing long black abayas, the enveloping cloaks that hide the figures of small and large-chested women alike, gets especially old for a young Iranian drawing student who's supposed to be sketching female nudes. Um…

7. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Contrary to earlier Indiana Jones incarnations, having breasts in this last movie is synonymous with being lame. Kate Blanchett steps in as the communist bad guy (bad girl?) with zero personality and, bizarrely enough, zero sexual appeal. Karen Allen, once young, beautiful, and most importantly spunky, is now dressed to resemble a motherly sack of potatoes. Anyways, why couldn't we have had a sassy, secret, long-lost daughter of Indy's appear instead of a motorcycle-riding son?

6. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

This one is simple: the two main female characters in the second move in the Narnia series are more or less pre-pubescent girls. Grown-up women, i.e. women with breasts, would never be allowed to have that much fun.

5. The Dark Knight

Maggy Gyllenhaal may not have a ton to work with when it comes to curves, but what she's got sure does get her into trouble. Just for being a girl -- and not even Batman's girlfriend -– she find herself grabbed by the throat, thrown out of a building, and eventually good old-fashioned blown up. How is that fair again?

4. No Country for Old Men

Yet again, no one fairs too well in this film about a psycho killer and the inevitable horribleness of mankind. Still, it's hard not to identify with and root for one of the few women in the film, sweet-talking Carla Jean, the innocent wife of a small-town cowboy who makes the mistake of taking someone else's money. She gets nearly to the end of the film without being brutally murdered, only to then get… brutally murdered. Not cool.

3. Kung Fu Panda

Though this animated movie about a pudgy panda defending his village features the voice of the sultry Angelina Jolie, the character she plays -- a female tiger who's an expert at Kong Fu -– had absolutely no chest at all. We're talking one flat tiger. And that, according to the pattern we've been tracking, is why nothing heinous happens to her and it can be a carefree movie.

2. Wall-E

Here we have another example of a hit movie in which the main female character –- this time a feisty white robot named Eve –- has no breasts. Well, how could she? She's essentially a robotic egg. The point: once again, she ends up a-OK. With the help of Wall-E, her doe-eyed boyfriend, she helps save humanity and planet earth. If she'd had boobs, she probably would have ended up drifting in the vacuum of space, a la 2001: A Space Odyssey.

1. Sex and the City

Whether or not you blame it on the sheer number of breasts (fine, eight) our once-beloved girls share between them, apparently it just sucked to be in this movie at all.